Joe Biden started very strong that looked like Franklin Delano. Then he collapsed. Biden overestimated his bipartisan conviction and mediation skills. After 36 years of consummate attendance at the Senate perhaps, as what you will read below suggests, he does not seem to have realized that the climate has changed, that is, it has become that of Arrakis, the planet of Dune.
Then, as an editorial in the “Financial Times” points out, Biden surrounded himself with yes-men and trusted friends in good weather without anyone of them being able to tell him with the necessary authority “No, president”. Does anyone remember this choice?
The fact is that with such ostentatious self-confidence, Biden has so far failed to even convince all the Democrats. Let alone the Republicans. Democratic Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin III have denied him virtually every major item on his agenda. And now Biden, a few months away from the midterm elections, is where he started from. Okay, he was also unlucky. Not even the Covdi gave him a bit of a break.
There is now a lot of unease in Democratic ranks and among those who want to curb second-wave Trumpism. In fact, the ex-president is already in the rear-view mirror and Biden doesn't seem like an option that can be spent twice. This sentiment it is clearly perceived in the editorial by the "top columnist" of the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize Maureen Dowd that we propose below.
Happy reading.
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NB We have placed in square brackets some brief notes on some references to American politics and history that the Italian reader, not assiduous of American things, might ignore.
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Poor Joe
Joe Biden's Sorrows: Kyrsten Sinema Humiliated Him; Mitch McConnell [Senate Republican leader] disrespected him; the Supreme Court blocked it; Vladimir Putin defied him; inflation has pressed him; Covid harassed him. Even Stacey Abrams [running for Democrat for governor of Georgia] turned away from him.
The feelings the president is experiencing right now are the ones we are experiencing ourselves. Pity, anger, disappointment, embarrassment… and hope that we can go on, because the alternative is really scary.
As much as Biden and his staff are struggling, we cannot give up on Biden because he is all that stands between us and the apocalypse by Trump, DeSantis [Republican governor of Florida], Pence [former vice president], Kristi Noem [South Dakota Governor] and incoming Chief Justice Amy Coney Barrett [Conservative quota Supreme Court justice].
The nostalgic Biden
President Biden has so far fantasized about being a Senate Master&Commander. Unfortunately, that was the 1984 Senate. He thought he was equal to Mitch McConnell in senatorial astuteness. But, so far, McConnell – the Einstein of the filibuster – has had surprising success in screwing up Biden's agenda.
Biden's single major achievement, infrastructure, was achieved with McConnell's support because there was enough money in the law to fix potholes in the Bourbon road in Kentucky where McConnell's constituency is.
When President Biden took to the Senate last week to have lunch with Democrats and discuss the situation, since the aftermath of Kyrsten Sinema's stab in the heart, he couldn't help but fall into the nostalgic mists of the past, the good old days where you could work with Webster, Clay and Calhoun (Maybe not Calhoun). [Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, the grand triumvirate, were the three legislators who dominated Chapter Hill in the first half of the 19th century]
In the private meeting on Capitol Hill in the Kennedy Caucus Room with representatives of the Democratic Party, according to the reconstruction of some present, Biden recounted how much it meant to him, a newly elected senator, to be taken out to lunch by Ted Kennedy. The president then said, with melancholy, that he saw the empty Senate dining room, that room where, once upon a time, all the senators conversed and worked out agreements in a climate of bipartisan collegiality. Finally, returning to a point he touched upon in his impassioned speech in Atlanta on voting rights, he said that even Strom Thurmond — the 1948 segregationist presidential candidate — would have been more pro-voting than Republicans are today. .
But gulping down bean soup with McConnell and [South Dakota Senator] John Thune won't bring down the voting rights fever. No matter how many times Biden mentions Strom Thurmond, the climate the president seeks will never come back.
“Strom Thurmond?” Nancy Pelosi blurted out after Biden brought it up in his speech in Atlanta. "None of us have many fond memories of Strom Thurmond."
The goal of the Republicans
The problem is always the same from the start. It is not the Senate, the country or the world that Biden remembers with nostalgia. Republicans are not open to dialogue or willing to be persuaded. Their goal, as it was with Barack Obama, is to make Biden's presidency a failure.
One of the many flaws in Kyrsten Sinema's shaky logic in her Senate speech on why filibustering must be preserved is that she chides Democrats for not working hard enough to get Republicans to protect voting rights .
Psst! Senator Synema. That's the point. Republicans really don't want everyone to vote, unless they're rural or white. And they don't want to help Biden. This is all to their advantage. McConnell is hardly a sucker.
Republicans know that making voting easier during the pandemic has boosted Senate elections for Georgia's two freshman Democrats [Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff elected in January of 2021 defeating the two Republican incumbents] and carried Chuck Schumer [ Democratic Senator from New York State], not McConnell, as leader of the Senate.
And McConnell doesn't want that to happen again. Though Schumer is such a coward that he put aside, due to bad weather!, the promise of a voting rights showdown by Martin Luther King Day.
Sinema believes more talk is needed: "We need clear and ongoing strategies that set aside party labels and focus on our democracy," he said. Certain! As if this could actually happen. She is raving like Biden.
Why Biden was elected
Biden was elected not to be Trump, to be a comfortable old shoe. He promised too much and didn't keep his promises. People wanted competence and stability and instead we have incompetence and instability.
Biden is running the White House like a Senate office with the usual circle of white male aides from the good old days
The real problem is the president himself, who cannot even shake the Judiciary Commission [the Judiciary Committee which also investigates the events of January 6, 2021] which holds its most important hearings in the same Caucus Room where Biden met the Democrats.
Biden is in the weeds. He's so lost in the mists of yore that he's continuing his "Amtrak Joe" commute nearly every weekend between Washington and Delaware, albeit in a better ride than the one he used when he was in the Senate. Instead of the train [Amtrak. precisely] travels the Marine One [the aircraft of the Marines used to transport the president].
We want the president to rise and be an inspirational figure. We are not interested in the incremental updates of his negotiations with Joe Manchin [the Democratic senator from West Virginia who decides in Senate votes, where Democrats have only one majority seat].
We want to see Covid under control. We want to see the sacred right to vote protected. We want supermarket shelves stocked with affordable milk and meat. We want a president who tells us we will get through this and be stronger than before.
Joe Biden better get moving or he won't be back in the White House. If he doesn't start now, he will set the stage for a rout in this fall's midterm elections. And in 2024, who knows how bad that could get?
Poor us.
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By Maureen Dowd, More Mojo, Joe!, “The New York Times”, January 15, 2022
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Maureen dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her work as a commentator, became the New York Times Op-Ed columnist in 1995. In August 2014, she also began contributing to Times Magazine.
Born in Washington 70 years ago, in 1983 she joined the "New York Times" as a metropolitan reporter and then moved to the Washington office of the New York newspaper where she began writing on politics as a White House correspondent. She has covered nine presidential campaigns, including editing the Times Magazine column "On Washington."
In 2004 he published his first book, Bushworld on the personality of George W. Bush, a book that quickly climbed the best-seller list. She therefore dedicated herself to the question of genres, anticipating with Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, published in 2005, the themes of the Me Too movement.
In addition to The New York Times, Maureen Dowd has written and writes for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated, and more. Her column appears every Sunday in the New York Times
